15.10.1998

Taaffe’s debacle

Party notes

Like me, many readers will have been waiting eagerly to see how The Socialist - paper of Peter Taaffe’s beleaguered Socialist Party in England and Wales - reported the creation of the Scottish Socialist Party on September 20. After unsuccessfully scouring successive issues of the paper for an item on it, I actually phoned the editorial office to check. I was assured that there had indeed been a “small report” and that “a larger one” was coming. Presumably, the penny then dropped with the nervy hack I was speaking to. He blurted out - a little belatedly, it must be said - “Er ... CPGB ... I’m not talking to you”, and slammed the phone down. I almost felt sorry for him.

The report - if it exists - must be nano, not just “small” - I’m buggered if I can find it. It seems the editor of The Socialist - Ken Smith - has circumvented the tricky problem of putting a positive spin on this disaster for SPEW by simply not mentioning it at all!

Indeed, it is hard to see what SPEW could write about this debacle. Taaffe - the toweringly inept politician who has led his organisation into this fiasco - has managed to lose the entire Scottish section. His ‘fight’ against this nationalist split consisted of carping about the frequency of meetings or the number of full-timers required to maintain a viable ‘Marxist’ organisation. Deservedly, this miserable method was defeated crushingly by the Scottish Militant Labour leadership - Taaffe did not manage to win a single vote for his position in Scotland. And who can be surprised?

After all, Alan McCombes and the other opportunist leaders of Scottish Militant Labour at least offered some sort of political vision, a rationale for the creation of a new party that flowed logically from the rotten methodology lodged in the whole history of the Socialist Party, and Militant before it. Taaffe’s technical complaints against their determination to split his organisation were thus doomed and - as I have written before - a little sad.

What on earth can he say now? Should this split be reported as a step forward? But then why have Taaffe and the Hepscott Road apparatus consistently opposed the move? How can they present the fact that Scotland has shown two fingers not simply to SPEW, but also to the Committee for a Workers International, as a positive development? After all, the SPEW executive committee wrote to its SML opposite number warning it that the decision to press ahead with the establishment of the SSP - prior to the SPEW special congress on October 3-4 and the CWI world congress in November - would be a move

“unprecedented in the history of the CWI and a breach of the norms and especially the spirit of ‘democratic unity’ [Taaffe’s fluffy euphemism for his version of ‘democratic centralism’ - MF]” (reprinted in Weekly Worker September 10).

Having witnessed this contemptuous flouting of CWI discipline, will Taaffe now just limply let the Scots stay in? If he does, what possible meaning can this ‘discipline’ have? What is to stop any section - like the increasingly stroppy Pakistan group which is being circled by a hopeful Australian Democratic Socialist Party - essentially doing its own thing? A wimpish acceptance of the right of the ‘SML’ faction in the SSP to do exactly what it likes, when it likes, spells a quick and not very graceful end for the whole CWI project.

OK, so let us assume that Taaffe and his dwindling band of followers decide to stage a fight and agitate against the ‘SML’ split by organising a counter-split. Frankly, it is probably too late. For a start, around what programme can such a fantasy struggle be organised? On the principled basis of fighting for working class organisational unity against the British state that oppresses us all, against the poison of splitting our historically united class along national lines?

But the politically vacant Taaffe has already conceded this principle, accepting that his Scottish organisation required “autonomy” because of the special circumstances created by the spread of nationalism in Scotland. He has already conceded that SML ought to propagate an “independent socialist Scotland”. Indeed, it was the fact that Taaffe had already surrendered political principle that inevitably restricted the content of his ‘fight’ against the split to technical objections. Thus, Taaffe’s number two - Lynn Walsh - could only write in the letter cited above that the “organisational proposals [from the SML EC] are completely inadequate from the point of view of maintaining a revolutionary Marxist organisation and a viable section of the CWI in Scotland” (my emphasis). The little political detail of how tailing and positively promoting nationalism would help to ‘maintain’ ‘SML’ as a “revolutionary Marxist organisation” has not warranted a mention in any of the criticisms emanating from London, however.

There is a reason for this, of course. What we are seeing in Scotland is essentially the revenge of ‘Grantism’. Ted Grant - the founder and long-time leader of Militant - elevating the practice of tailing the existing consciousness of the workers to an art form, misnaming this ‘Marxism’. In Grant’s day, this translated essentially into a narrow Labourism.

Inside Labour, the intense atmospheric pressure generated by its hostile environment compacted Militant into a tight, cohesive little sect. Outside, the same method has seen the organisation - now guided by the monkey, Taaffe, after the revolt against Grant, the theoretical organ grinder - quickly become infected by black separatism, feminism, trade union economism and Scottish nationalism - to name just a few of the more pernicious maladies. Everything, it seems, has been queuing up to rip chunks out of the organisation, apart from Marxism.

Thus, when McCombes and the SML leadership rationalised their accommodation to the forces of Scottish particularism by the shallow method of opinion poll chasing they were positioning themselves unassailably in the rotten traditions of the organisation. Without a revolution in his political method, Taaffe is organically incapable of fighting this disintegration effectively. And who could seriously accuse Taaffe of being a ‘revolutionary’?

The positive lesson to be learnt - although whether Taaffe and his dismal leadership team are capable of absorbing it is extremely doubtful - is that of standing on political principle. This may not win you numbers immediately, but is the only way to ensure the long-term survival and growth of a political organisation and, more importantly, its actual use to the class. In contrast to what the majority of SPers have had drummed into them over the years, standing on principle is the only thing that makes you strong, not the opportunist chase after the latest trend.

Look at the negative example to prove this. What possible use to the workers is Peter Taaffe’s crisis-wracked SPEW and its pink tartan offspring in Scotland?

Mark Fischer
national organiser